She, though an outsider, must speak for them. More­over, Reebok High Top it is the expression of a desire to he fulfilled at some future point, not the planning of an action in the present cf. Hall. In fact, implicit in the state­ment is justification for inaction: if your son should come again. they could Reebok outlet act; but. of course, resurrection is not to be expected. The weaving of narra­tive must precede any Discount Reebok Shoes  Reebok Zigtech movement into the social realm. It is Meridian's insight into her own situation, not that of the congregation, that is the focus of narra­tive attention. She now understands the circumstances under which she could take a life. She claims spiritual maternity by asserting that she could kill to save the boy and others like him. Her role is that of nurturer, protector, and culturebearer. The revolutionaries do the fighting, and Meridian provides the music that Zigtech running shoes makes sense of the struggle and that saves the soul of the people. When they stop to wash off the blood and find their throats too choked with the smell of murdered flesh to sing, I will come forward and sing from memory songs they will need oncc more to hear. The people them­selves have no role in this tremendous effon on their behalf. They are kept outside of history, an object of contemplation and a source of inspiration for the fighters and artists of the revolution. For Meridian, in slight contrast to Lynne, it is not the folk hut the souls of black folk that are An cf. Hall.Given her understanding and commitment in this passage, it is signifi­cant that Reebok Zigfuel Mendian is absent herself from the end of the novel. Her efforts for the people and her overcoming of maternal guilt by interpreting those efforts as maternal have healed her. Reebok Easytone Shoes And having been healed, she walks away. She leaves Truman to take over guiding the people and in the process healing himself. This transition suggests that what happens to the individual is more important than the community or society. Meridian has been the guide, noi so much for the folk as for those modem individuals Truman. Lynne. Anne Marion who are no longer pan of the community and who suffer as a result. Once the selfhealing occurs, Women Reebok Shoes there is no longer a responsibility to the people. Social action is a form of therapy; community improvement is merely a means to a private end.The furthest remove from community comes in Advancing Luna and Ida B. Wells. The story develops the logic of the rape of Lynne depicted in Meridian The narrator is a young black woman who spent a brief time oneRape is transmuted into a permissible effect of black suffering and white penance for that suffering. Lynne denies him the humanity of being respon­sible for an act of violence.

Her embrace of him turns assault into fulfilled desire, Reebok High Top apparently for both of them. He can both satisfy his sexual need for the white woman and express his hostility toward the white world; she can be the sacrificc that links her to black suffering. By kissing his stump, which Reebok Zigfuel approximates the phallus, she submits to black male authority and thus escapcs the guilt associated with her whiteness. At the same time, she can sustain her image of black experience in something like its purity.Significantly, neither Truman nor Meridian wants to hear her story, in part because they, too. wish to construct a version of the folk that serves their private purposes while permitting them to interpret themselves as benefac­tors. Meridian is the most extreme example of this Her responses to the world arc shaped in pan by guilt, first the guilt Reebok outlet of having stolen something from her mother and. second, the guilt of having abandoned her son to pursue her education. Hers is the dilemma of the modern woman: how is it possible to live an individually meaningful life in a world that Women Reebok Shoes still demands loyalty to tradiiional roles? What she has stolen from her mother, simply by being her child, is indcpcndcncc and individuality. She exacerbates the problem by giving up her own child; she in effect discredits the sacrificc made by her mother cf. Callahan ; Daly.This conflict about maternity inspires Meridian's commitment to the civil rights movement. She seeks, in cfTcct, the social equivalent of her mother's sacnfice. She takes In and Reebok Easytone Shoes identifies with the outcasts in the college commu­nity. She has an abortion when Truman loses his interest in her, but she never tells him. She offers to die for the movement but is uncertain of her willing­ness to kill. When she is rejected by her revolutionary friends for her ambiva­lence, she chooses to return to the rural South, even though that form of activism has become pass. Zigtech running shoes During all this time, her health is fragile, and she consis­tently enters catatonic states after her public challenges to authority. In this sense, her repudiation of her mother's life in truth reenacts its sacrificial quality.Her work with the folk has a healing effect on her over time. In her encounters with them, there is little evidence of ethical or political principles being transmitted In either direction. The people are particularly empowered by her actions. She sees herself as doing for them: They appreciate it when somebody volunteers to suffer. They are consistently shown to be sim­ply good people who must be led. Even the transformative religious scrvicc near the conclusion of the novel reveals a largely passive people. After the grieving father has Discount Reebok Shoes  Reebok Zigtech spoken his ritual three words.

 My son died on the anniversary of the young activist death. Meridian has Reebok High Top an insight into the congregation's response to his call: The people Reebok Zigfuel in the church. were say while woman who aligns herself with hlacks is seen as a race traitor and whore by whites, who read her association with an inferior, promiscuous race as the lowest form of profanation. Blacks, regardless of their individual views of her. retain a clear perception of her symbolic power in southern society. Her motives must be questioned because affiliation with her is deeply problematic. At the same time, her significance and danger can make her a powerful object of desire, less in the sexual than in the political sense. A sexual attack on her is an attack on the basis of white supremacy. It is simul­taneously an act of revenge and rebellion, though in one sense it Reebok outlet reinforces racism by accepting the premise of contamination. To have a white woman is to ruin her for white men.Thus Tommy Odds's rape of Lynne expresses his personal rage and al­lows him to engage in a political act. He can vent his hostility toward whites without committing a suicidal attack on the white men who shot him. But the assault on her is a strangely safe act. She Is already viewed as racially Zigtech running shoes promis­cuous by the white community simply by being where she is; attacking her will not affect their views in the least. Moreover, he is reasonably certain that she will not seek justice: She wished she could go to the police, but she was more afraid of them than she was of Tommy Odds, because ihey would attack young black men in the Discount Reebok Shoes  Reebok Zigtech community indiscriminately and the people she wanted most to sec protected would suffer. The very motives and circumstanccs that necessitated the movement generally and Lynne's partici­pation specifically make it impossible for her to seek justice. The very power of her Women Reebok Shoes whiteness precludes her resistance to sexual violence. Moreover, her aesthcticist view of black life holds even during the assault:She lay. thinking of his feelings, his hardships, of the way he was Reebok Easytone Shoes black and belonged to people who lived without hope; she thought about the loss of his arm. She felt her own guilt She did not any longer resist but tried instead lo think of Tommy Odds as he was when he was her friend and near the end her arms stole around his neck, and before he left she told him she forgave him and she ktssed.

 his slick rounded stump that was the color of baked liver, and he smiled at her from far away, she did not know him. As Elliott ButlerEvans Reebok Zigfuel has noted: If the novel's racial politics demands that it explore Tommy Odds's behavior within the context of racial oppression, it is also committed to investigating Lynne's status as victim. That issue is some­what ambiguously presented through the graphic detail of the rape coupled with Lynne's commiimeni to the correct political attitude, even at the ex­pense of her own welfare.Meridian and Lynne link ihe personal and political in different ways. Both of them arc damaged by Truman arrogance, but they also sufTcr because of their complex Reebok outlet motivations for and responses to social activism. For Lynne, who grows up in a privileged northern Jewish environment that was both protected and standardized, the South and especially the black folk there represent vitality and creativity.Lynne's need to escape that northern life is not a desire to become south­ern herself; she never in the course of the novel loses the Women Reebok Shoes individualistic, secular assertiveness that she bmught with her from the North. Rather, she wishes to exploit the geographic, racial Other to satisfy her personal and cul­tural lack Zigtech running shoes in a variation of what George Frederickson has called romantic ra­cialism. Her Jewishness is part of her sensibility as well. She grows up in a postHolocaust world that suppresses the knowledge of suffering so that children like her can develop in a state of carefully maintained Innocence. She responds by seeking out suffering, but suffering that has been reified: Mis­sissippi after the disappearance of the three civil rights workers in began to beckon her. Discount Reebok Shoes  Reebok Zigtech For two years she thought of nothing Reebok High Top else. If Mississippi is the worst place in America for black people, it stood to reason, she thought, that the Art that was their lives would flourish best there. The South for her, then, is a living museum. Denied the narrative of her own people's great horror, in part because it is too real to be subjected to aesthetic control, she turns to a parallel experience that has both immediacy and distance.The problem with Lynne's approach is her refusal to accept the human­ity of those she has Reebok Easytone Shoes constructed as art objects. She cannot grasp the ambiva­lence created by her own whiteness, which produces a volatile mix of desire and hostility. She fails to understand the effect her presence has on both blacks and whites in the South. Tommy Odds blames her for the loss of his arm in an act of racial violence; by being with a group of black men, she endangered them. Through a conversation with Odds.